The ramblings of the Global Village Idiot.

Tag Archives: Cyber truth

Five am usually finds me on my walk, though this morning, I moved from my usual morning play list and found myself listening to Duke Ellington’s “Single Petal From a Rose” and I was stunned and stopped by the sheer beauty of the piece- indeed, it reduced me to tears. As a former performer, it made me think about the true purpose of creation. Maybe, that is the true purpose of our being, to create something so achingly beautiful, so painfully exquisite that it would almost stop time. Take a moment and entertain the thought that this may be the true purpose of our life. It may be the only noble goal we can have. Keats wrote that Beauty is truth, truth beauty. Today, take a moment and focus on doing one thing as beautifully as possible, be that making a sandwich, parking the car, making the bed or interacting with another person. If we can make at least one task in our day beautiful, we can increase the beauty in the world and find an element of truth for ourselves. In an age of multiple narratives perhaps our personal truth is all we can hope for.

There was always that one guy in High School (at least when I was in high school) who would go to the mat to try to make you believe that Paul Mc Cartney was dead. True to form, the urban legend states that in 1967 Paul McCartney had been killed in a traffic accident while driving along the M1 motorway. While there was no real proof, only rumors, and hazy evidence, the rumor persisted and still has its followers today. The insecurity of the past, the idea that we can’t be sure of what really happened can take many forms, from a false memory, where a person recalls something that did not happen or differently from the way it happened but the idea is taken to a whole new level around 2014 when a concept “The Mandella Effect” began to take hold. It seems that some people remembered Nelson Mandela’s tragic death in a South African prison, prior to late 2009. (In this reality, Mandela died in 2013.) The idea being that someone had gone back to tamper with the past and re-set our experience of it. While we have often spoken of cyber truth in this blog, this idea seems to take the idea into a much larger and more terrifying realm. While a computer could easily erase our bank records we like to think that we have some memory of what happened and that other people could confirm our story. However, the more terrifying reality is that we could find ourselves in a George Bailey like fate, alive and remembering a world in which he never existed. As we continue to hear more tales of data being stolen, do we not see that the true goal may not be just our data but the very fact that we ever existed?